Young Adam in 1954

ALEXANDER TROCCHI was born in Glasgow in 1925, the son of a Scottish mother and an Italian father. After one year of studying at Glasgow University, he was called up for war service in 1943, and joined the Royal Navy. He returned to complete his degree three years later. Afterwards he travelled in Europe, and settled down in Paris, where he edited Merlin, an avant-garde literary journal. He also started his writing career, producing work for the controversial publisher Olympia Press, including the first version ofYoung Adam in 1954. His lifelong drug habit began in this period. He then moved to the US, settling first in New York City, where he worked on a scow on the Hudson River, then in California, where the Beat community had relocated. It was during this time that he wrote possibly his most famous novel, Cain’s Book (1961). He moved to London in the 1960s, where he more or less ceased his writing activities and remained until his death in 1984. Young Adam Alexander Trocchi With an introduction by Stewart Home ONEWORLD CLASSICS ONEWORLD CLASSICS LTD London House 243-253 Lower Mortlake Road Richmond Surrey TW9 2LL United Kingdom www.oneworldclassics.com This edition published in the UK by Calder Publishing Ltd, 2003 Published 1954 by Olympia Press, subsequently revised 1961 and published by William Heinemann and in paperback by New English Library, 1966. Later published by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd, 1983, Rebel Inc, 1997. © Calder Publishers UK Ltd & Alexander Trocchi Estate, 1954, 1961, 1966, 1983, 1999, 2003. This edition first published by Oneworld Classics Limited in 2008 Introduction © Stewart Home, 2008 Printed in Great Britain by CPI Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading ISBN: 978-1-84749-042-1 All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or presumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher. Young Adam Introduction LEXANDER TROCCHI was born in Glasgow in 1925 and died in A London in 1984. His life, as much as his writing, is the stuff of legend. Considered by many to be the most dissolute of the beats, for a time it looked like he was more likely to be remembered as “The Lord of Junk” than as a writer. Trocchi was notorious both for his prodigious chemical intake and pimping his wife Lyn to get money to pay for drugs. But times change and fashions do too; and now “Scots Alex”, as Trocchi was known on the west London drug scene, has become an almost respectable literary figure. For contemporary Scots writers Trocchi’s immersion in the hippy counterculture makes him a more attractive literary figure than the country’s other relatively visible modernists of the Fifties and Sixties, such as Edwin Morgan, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Hugh MacDiarmid (all principally poets). Irvine Welsh has been quoted as calling Trocchi “the George Best of Scottish literature”. Other Scots writers owe even deeper debts to Trocchi; former boxer Barry Graham went as far as penning a Trocchi parody novel The Book of Man (1995). In London, where Trocchi settled in the early Sixties, he towers over those who might be seen as his most immediate English literary heirs, such as Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson and Alan Burns. Trocchi did little writing after washing up in London, but he cut a doomed and dashing figure hanging out with the likes of black power leader Michael Abdul Malik, and fellow beat generation stalwart William Burroughs. There is considerable division over which Trocchi book is his best, but the consensus of opinion is either Young Adam (1954) or Cain’s 7 YOUNG ADAM Book (1961). Young Adam tends to catch the attention of those less interested in drugs and literary experimentation. To date this book has suffered from being seen as a work of late-modernism cast in the same mould as Beckett, Genet and Ionesco. Trocchi had a hand in publishing all three of these writers when he lived in Paris in the early to mid-Fifties. Trocchi’s importance as a proto-postmodernist has been obscured by what in retrospect appears an arbitrary division between his porn novels and “serious” works. In fact Young Adam, the earlier of his two “serious” novels, was first published under the pseudonym Frances Lengel as a “dirty book” by Olympia Press in 1954. The other titles written by Trocchi and published by Olympia under this name are Helen and Desire (1954), Carnal Days of Helen Seferis (1954), School for Sin (1955) and White Thighs (1955). Trocchi re-edited Young Adam, removing a number of the erotic passages, so that it might be issued by a “reputable” publisher at a time when the use of extended pornographic tropes in literary novels had yet to become an accepted postmodern practice (cf. Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and Chris Kraus). What Trocchi excised from his “definitive” version ofYoung Adam were principally sex scenes, with one important exception. This is a climactic passage where Trocchi’s narrator Joe recalls an argument with Cathie, his former lover, whose dead body he helps drag from a canal at the beginning of the book. Cathie is supporting Joe as he unsuccessfully attempts to complete a novel. Joe describes a day on which instead of writing he made custard, and when Cathie comes home this leads to a row. She refuses to eat the custard, so Joe throws it at her as she is taking off her work clothes, then he thrashes her with a rough slat of wood, before proceeding to tip ink, various sauces and vanilla essence over the girl: I don’t know whether she was crying or laughing as I poured a two-pound bag of sugar over her. Her whole near-naked body was 8 INTRODUCTION twitching convulsively, a blue breast and a yellow and red one, a green belly, and all the colour of her pain and sweat and gnashing. By that time I was hard. I stripped off my clothes, grasped the slat of the egg crate, and moved among her with prick and stick, like a tycoon. When I rose from her, she was a hideous mess, almost un- recognizable as a white woman, and the custard and the ink and the sugar sparked like surprising meats on the twist of her satisfied mound. Trocchi is clearly using a fictional voice and, although it might be argued that he shares some of the Joe’s misogyny, he was not prone to the racism implicit in the term “white woman”. Likewise Trocchi’s decision not to use Cathie’s name at any point during his description of the “sploshing” and “thrashing” is clearly a conscious device aimed at revealing Joe’s dehumanized “nature” as he reduces the object of his lust and fury to the same base level. This is just one of many passages that demonstrate Trocchi did not want Joe to be a sympathetic “character”, or for the reader to trust him as a narrator. Joe’s claim, sustained pretty much throughout the second and third parts of Young Adam, that Cathie met her death accidentally is not necessarily to be believed, just as at the end of American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis the reader is left uncertain as to whether the narrator Patrick Bateman is a psychotic serial killer or a pathetic fantasist. Another contemporary New York writer who retrospectively helps illuminate Trocchi’s aesthetic stance here is Lynne Tillman. At the climax of her novel No Lease On Life (1998), the narrator Elizabeth Hall is so frustrated by her inability to find any peace in her Lower East Side apartment that she sends a rain of eggs splattering onto those making noise in the street below her. Tillman’s book is loosely modelled on James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). The action 9 YOUNG ADAM takes place over twenty-four hours, but the tenor of the work and its denouement mark it as self-consciously postmodern. Tillman and Trocchi, who knew each other briefly, share a love of classic modernist literature, but at the same time both have moved beyond what even by the early 1950s was an exhausted literary form. Trocchi’s narrator, Joe, only admits that he knew Cathie halfway through Young Adam. Joe claims he’d wanted to focus on his attraction to his subsequent lover Ella, and therefore didn’t explain how Cathie fitted into the overall picture of his life. At this point it is Joe and not the reader who has lost the plot. He is confused and says he killed Cathie: “There’s no point in denying it since no one would believe me”. To underline his sense of disorientation, Trocchi makes Joe speak of police “sensationalism” being reported in the newspapers, a reversal of commonplaces about “media sensationalism”. The reader only has Joe’s version of events, and Trocchi goes to great lengths to underline his unreliability: It was an odd thing that I, who saw Cathie topple into the river, should have been the one to find her body the following morning at one mile’s distance from where she fell in.

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